


If I Have To, I Guess

by MooseFeels



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Beekeeping, Canada, Fluff and Angst, Libraries, Mounties (RCMP), Veterinary Medicine
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-16 20:35:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/866339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MooseFeels/pseuds/MooseFeels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean is a mountie. Sam works on a nature preserve. It's all pretty normal in the tiny town they live in until a beekeeper blows in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The winters came cold and sharp in the North.

       Cold enough to hurt a man's bones, especially if you had taken enough hard falls, like Dean had.

       His hips ached as he dismounted from his horse- a black mare he'd been riding with for a few years now, and his knees groaned as he stood upright.

       He'd always felt stupid in the formal uniform and on mount, but hey, with a name like the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, it came with the gig.

       He didn't have time to get dressed into his real-life clothes before he had to start work on paperwork, and by the time four am rolled around, Dean was hungry and still in uniform.

       The Roadhouse was the only decent twenty-four-hour breakfast joint in the whole god-for-saken province, and while the ride was a rough twenty minutes up and down iced back roads, it was worth it for the outright celestial smell of fresh coffee, frying bacon, and flapjacks, hot from the griddle.

       They knew him there, the Harvelle widow and her girl. Her husband had died before Dean's time- Ellen was her name, and she'd always been friendly to the mounties that had inherited the force from her husband

       When Dean slid onto the barstool he had come to think of as 'his,' it was a matter of seconds before a cuppa was before him, black and steaming and hot.

       Dean and his brother had always disagreed on any number of things, but black coffee had always been something they shared.

       He wouldn't be surprised to see Sam here this morning. The nature reserve he worked at wasn't too far out from The Roadhouse, and Sam would probably want a good breakfast to ground him before he started wrangling the bears and big cats at the sanctuary.

 

       Dean settled into the coffee, the warmth of it seeping through the ceramic mug and into his cold fingertips. He knew, soon, that exhaustion would give way into irritation, and it would be a long eighteen hours before he got back to his shitty apartment to get any kind of sleep, but in this moment of quiet in a dimly lit diner with a cuppa jo, he felt something very nearly approaching bliss.

       He sighed into the steam, and he would argue to his death that he did not close his eyes for a moment.

       When he opened his eyes again, he was greeted by the blissful sight of two eggs (sunny side up), bacon, a bowl of oatmeal, and two pancakes. It was a sight that made him so happy he could cry, and he had been looking at it since he was eleven.

       He took a sip of his coffee and dove into the eggs.

       "Mmm, starting with the eggs first, eh?" Someone asked beside him. "Good thinking. When they turn cold, they're no good."

       Dean finished his bite and looked up and over. "Pardon?" he asked.

       The stranger continued. "When they're cold they're no good. Turn all rubbery. I can only stomach them right out of the pan."

       The stranger was a man, around Dean's age. Bit under six feet, probably, and lighter set. Lean muscle where Dean tended to be a bit husky. Dark hair, blue eyes.

       Call it a policeman's habit, to automatically profile someone at first glance.

 

       The man was nursing a cup of coffee of his own, along with a grapefruit half, hash browns, and oatmeal of his own.

       "Hi," he said. "I'm Castiel."

       "You're new to town," Dean said by way of an answer.

       "Yes," was the reply. "Came to work in my brother's bait-shop down by the lake."

       "Gabriel?" Dean asked incredulous. "You're related?"

       Gabriel was maybe five and a half feet tall on a good day, had honey colored hair, and possessed an attitude that had driven Dean to butt heads with him on multiple occasions, particularly his habit of removing all of his clothes and reading on his porch.

       "We're both adopted," Castiel said, nonchalant. "Chuck didn't think it was environmentally responsible to have kids when there were ones that needed homes."

       Dean nodded, vaguely flabbergasted.

       "I'm Dean, Dean Winchester," he finally managed.

       Castiel smiled. "Oh, you're the one Gabriel calls the 'fascist,'" he said. "Yes, I've heard of you. Apparently Gabriel hasn't given up his association with the Sunbathers' Societies."

       "What?" Dean asked

       "Nudist clubs," Castiel said by way of explanation. "You should really eat your eggs."

       And very suddenly, as suddenly as he had come into Dean's moment, he was gone.

       "What in the hell," Dean muttered under his breath, and he kept eating his eggs.

       He managed to stretch his breakfast out to about twenty minutes before the walkie-talkie on his hip started to hiss at him.

       Dean sighed, jammed the last of his bacon into his mouth, and paid.

       It was going to be a long day.

 


	2. Chapter 2

The sun was coming up by the time he made it into town, and his brother was not far behind him.

       The moose was huge. Dean tended to forget how big they got until one tried to walk through the center of town and its antlers got hung on the lights. It happened every once in a while, and Dean was there to shut down traffic. Sam rumbled up in his sturdy jeep- he was there to take care of the moose.

       October tended to bring out the adventurousness in the local moose, and it was most commonly when this kind of thing occurred. There had been talk a couple of years back about raising the lines so that this kind of thing happened less often, but the heights on the animals meant that the stoplights would have to be high enough they were damn near impossible to see. Instead, the solution was to just shut down the traffic while whoever the preserve sent (always Sam) wrangled the moose.

       There wasn't any traffic, which meant whatever moose-whisperer magic Sammy worked went faster and soon the moose was heading back into the thick forest that enveloped the tiny hamlet on all sides.

       "It's like you're one of 'em," Dean said as the huge beast loped off.

       "Shut up," Sam said, rolling his eyes. "Why do you think I went to college?"

       Dean smiled. "Didn't see you at breakfast today, bitch."

       "Ate in the trailer, jerk," was the reply as Sam eased back into his vehicle. "I had a late night. We were having a bear problem up at the preserve. Goddamn campers never seal the trash cans right."

       Dean laughed, sympathetic. He'd been called out in the dead of night more than once to help after a bear took a shine to a set of cans. Sam usually had to handle the bear end of the situation.

       It had taken some time for Sam to find the thing that really worked for him, and it had been a summer split between first an animal shelter and next a national forest for him to really realize that he was good at nature. Big brain of his held onto information about plant and animal species tight, and his way with people meant he was a natural for leading groups.

       Dean was just glad he was out of the city and away from drugs.

       "Don't work too hard, alright," Dean called as Sam shut the door and drove away.

       And then Dean went into his own car and drove back to the station.

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

       The bait shop was a short jaunt from the lake at the edge of the district, far from the center of town, surrounded by nothing but towering conifers and evergreens. It smelled like the idea behind the little tree air-fresheners; pine bright and bracing, it was a smell that invaded the senses past the nose and seized a primal lust for fire and smoke and knives and heading out to a frigid lake at four in the morning bearing sticks and a four ninety nine bucket of nightcrawlers.

       It was not the city. The sky was dark and full of stars, not brown from an overabundance of light. The air was silent, not full of the rush and harshness of traffic.  You could get lost in a crush of trees instead of a sea of people.

       It was an adjustment for Castiel, who was outside of Vancouver for the first time in his life.

       He'd been there about three days before Gabriel told him about The Roadhouse, and the next two weeks he had there, he'd started spending the wee and strange hours between midnight and six am there, nursing cups of burnt coffee and bitter grapefruits.

       Half of the time he spent thumping the pencil on his yellow legal pad and the other half he spent looking out of the window. Then the cop entered the scene.

       The cop was tall, taller than Castiel. He had close-cropped brownish blondish hair and a dotting of freckles that seemed incongruous with the latitude. He would stomp in out of the night at around three or four, sit at the counter, and be wordlessly given the same plate of food. He might say thanks. He might chat with the owner a bit- a middle-aged woman named...named Elle? Ella? Elaine?- and then take three or four more cups of coffee before he paid and walked out.

       The Cop left Castiel fascinated, and the fascination continued now that Castiel had his name.

       Dean, he thought loosely as he swept the floor of the shop. Who are you, Dean?

       The dirt formed a neat pile before Castiel expelled it out of the door and into the cool morning. The bait shop had the rank and biological smell of guts and worms and dirt and bad, bad coffee. It was a shop that spoke of tetanus and rust and a very specific kind of danger. It was wildly disorganized, poorly labeled, and the scales cheated. It was a shop that was quintessentially Gabriel's.

       When Castiel had come out from the city with his big, old truck, the bed loaded with hives Gabriel had greeted him with open arms and the statement, "Good, you can start opening."

       When Gabriel came into the shop at around nine, Castiel took off to look after his bees.

       In the autumn there was less to do every day- the hives were beginning to go dormant, and truly did not require the inspection Castiel liked to constantly give them. He did worry over them though- last year he had some truly terrifying bee loss, and he hoped that the new frames he had built and leaving more honey behind than usual would do the trick.

       He'd picked up apiculture in school, and while his degree in Religion did not seem to do him much good, the bees did. They were a responsibility, a meditation. The stings did not bother him any more, the hum of wings was a mantra, and the scent of burning pine was incense.

       It was an activity that grounded him since he'd gotten out of prison.

       He thought about it still sometimes- still got the itchy, sticky fingers that made him want to touch and take and walk away. The song of the bees was like a conscience sometimes.

       Castiel laid his last line of sugar syrup, supplementary food for the hive, before tromping inside to get ready.

       Community service was part of his parole, and he'd been lucky enough to have a brother who could hook him up with a soft job in a library.

       The order that lived in the books was almost like the order that lived in the hive- it was warm and made sense

       He got cleaned up and drove back into town.

       The library was tiny, just big enough to merit lots of work and computer nightmares. A handful of rooms in what was left of an old widow's house, it was usually quiet until half-past two.

       Story time.

       Castiel had never thought he had a particular talent with children, but more than one blushing mother and the library's desperately over-worked keeper had been quick to tell him otherwise.

       He got there at about noon and shelved books and dusted and worked furiously at whatever intensely dumb issue the computer network had decided to possess this week.

       When the small children of the district started filing into the library at two, he picked up the book he had selected for the week- something by Beatrix Potter- and sat down in what had been dubbed The Big Chair.

       It was an overstuffed, plush thing with wings and a magnificent ottoman that held a tray of cookies and napkins.

       The children gathered around it in a tight circle. The Big Chair was sacrosanct. The Big Chair was untouchable by them at the magic time.

       Castiel eased down into it, surveyed the crowd quietly, and murmured, as he did every afternoon, "Good afternoon, children."

       "Good afternoon, Mr. Castiel!" Was the high, bright reply.

       He couldn't help his grin.

 


	4. Chapter 4

All days were slow in the district- not a hell of a lot happened in the sticks, but there was always paperwork to do, always phone calls to answer, and always files to sort. The days of paperwork and desk work were better than the days of car crashes and heart attacks, though, so Dean had little room to complain. Hell, the minute he even considered it, his chest ached in warning.

       When four o'clock rolled around and he was yawning so much his jaw started to ache, Bobby sent him home.

       "And no loitering," he barked as Dean shuffled out of the station. "I don't want a call from Ellen tellin' me you fell asleep in her dang diner again."

       Dean grinned from under his woolen cap. Bobby often had good ideas, but that didn't mean he listened...ever.

       He drove deep out of town to The Roadhouse.

       There was something nested in Dean's wiring that loved a good drive. He had a slick, mean muscle car- a classic Impala that was still hotter than hell despite pushing the age of forty- that he liked to drive during the handful of weeks when the roads weren't dangerously frosted.

       The car had been his father's, and when he'd left him and Sammy for a better, happier family he'd built in America, he'd had the grace to leave the car for Dean. The roads were still barely warm enough to hold back ice, and he was just far enough out that he could afford to speed a bit.

       Far enough out that he could push the needle towards that redline, turn up the stereo, and wail hard with Robert Plant.

       He knew, guiltily, that Ellen could probably hear him pull into the gravel parking lot, and he fingered the volume down before he climbed out and headed inside.

       The diner was more crowded than he usually saw it, and he thought, distantly, that he was in there when the world was awake. He smiled at the novelty of it and eased slowly into the spot at the counter that the town, the whole damn district probably, knew was his.

       It was a whisper of time before Ellen's daughter, a teenager by name of Jo, slid him a cup of coffee that actually tasted fresh. It was about ten minutes before she danced back by with the biggest, greasiest, most beautiful burger he'd ever seen.

       He sighed, in love, before he heard, "You know, if you keep eating like that, you're gonna get diabetes."

       Dean put down the burger and turned to glare at his brother, who was working furiously at a salad. It was, Dean knew, some sort of sick accession to Sam's request that "something on the menu without beef tallow." It was composed mostly of iceberg lettuce.

       "Sammy, you know me. I'm a warrior, not some kind of herbivore whisperer. I've got to speak with the predator inside of every man, not to the  bunnies and the deers," he shot back, tearing into the beef.

       Sam raised an eyebrow in challenge. "Dean," he replied, "I'm in charge of the damn bears."

       "And those eat fish," Dean said around his mouthful of food. "And everyone knows fish are practically a vegetable."

       "Oh yeah," squawked someone behind them, "I've seen a celery that would guzzle down chicken livers like a trout."

       "Gabriel," Dean said in greeting, not turning around.

       "Officer," Gabriel answered. Dean could practically hear the smirk on his face.

       He turned around on his stool. "I met your brother earlier today. Weird name- Cas or something?"

       "Castiel," Gabriel supplied, frowning. "He's not in trouble, is he?"

       "No?" Dean answered, curious. "Why, should he be?"

       Gabriel shook his head in relief. "No, not anymore. I'll be seeing you." He turned to Sam and smiled like the devil himself. "Heard about the moose taming you performed this morning. I've got some crazed badgers not too far off my property if you ever want to swing by." He waggled his eyebrows as if he were participating in some new height of seduction before dashing off.

       "Gabriel has a brother?" Sam asked.

       Dean nodded as he turned back around. "Yeah. Dark hair, blue eyes. Bit smaller than me, maybe six feet even."

       "Sure he's related to Gabriel?" He asked incredulously.

       "Apparently, they're both adopted," Dean answered. "How'd your day go, nature boy?"

       Sam shrugged. "It was alright. Busy getting set up for the winter. Supposed to be one of the coldest on record."

       Dean nodded.

       "I'm uh," Sam continued, "I'm three years clean today."

       Dean smiled without control. "And you didn't tell me sooner? Bitch."

       "Jerk," Sam laughed. "I'm taking tomorrow off in celebration. Gonna sleep in and everything." He got up and yawned. "In fact, I think I might make a head start of it."

       Dean nodded. "Seeya, Sam."

       His brother waved loosely as he headed off, leaving Dean to his coffee and the silence of being an island in the diner.

A couple of people poked around to say hello to him, but he was mostly left at peace as the night pulled gently on and the diner slowly emptied. Finally it was just him and Ellen, Jo having long ago slunk off to bed.

“How’s the hip?” She asked as she slid a piece of blackberry pie his way.

Dean shrugged. “Aches in the cold. Doesn’t like riding at all, but it’s healing. Besides, we both know chicks dig scars.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively, and to her merit, Ellen had known him long enough to roll her eyes in response.

“Your hip?” Someone asked next to him, and Dean nearly jumped out of his skin in response.

“Jesus!” He cried. “You just can’t do that to a man!”

Castiel was tucking into a glass of juice, and smiled as he brought the glass to his lips. Heavy circles hung under his eyes.

“Sorry,” he replied. “I’m poorly socialized, like a cat.”

Dean smiled in response. “You startled me, is all.”

Castiel set the glass back down and picked up a spoon and began to go after his grapefruit. “Your hip?” He repeated. “Answer the question.”

Dean shifted on the stool uncomfortably. “It’s nothing,” he said.

“That’s not answering the question,” he said.

“You’re fucking nosy, you know that?” Dean  snapped.

“Yes,” Casitel said. “Your hip?”

“I was shot,” Dean said. “Out in the city, okay? Turns out my vest didn’t do much in that region.”

Castiel cocked his head to the side, brows furrowing. “You’re not from around here?”

“No,”  Dean snapped. “We’re not from around here, alright?”

He smiled. “That’s funny. I had you and your brother pegged for locals. Local locals. Did boyscouts here and ran track in high school.”

“You think I ran track in high school?” Dean asked.

“Well,” Castiel answered, “maybe your brother. You’re shaped more like a rugby man.”

Dean laughed into his coffee. “Rugby,” he murmured. “I don’t get that much. I get American football- I even get American, but I don’t get rugby much.”

Castiel smiled, but it was distant and a little pained. “Anywhere around here to get a drink?” He asked.

Dean shook his head. “There’s the Cabin In The Woods, but Crowley is a real dickhole and you don’t want much to do with him. I do most of my drinkin’ solo.”

“Crowley?” he asked.

“Real piece of work,” he replied. “Trust me, if something fishy is happening in town, it’s Crowley.”

Castiel leaned over a bit, grinned impishly. “Something fishy, huh? Were the kids having too much fun with the toilet paper in the trees or something?”

“Heroin,” Dean said.

Castiel looked away, embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said. “I...sorry.”

Dean shrugged. “You didn’t know and I’m bitter.” He yawned. “I’m headin’ out,” he announced to the place.

“Drive safe,” Ellen called from the back.

“I always do,” he answered. He shrugged into his leather jacket and went outside, letting the door swing closed behind him.

He pretended he didn’t feel Castiel’s eyes on his back.

 


	5. Chapter 5

Castiel sat alone in the diner and picked at his waffle without much interest. When he’d first gotten out of prison, all he had wanted to do was eat. There hadn’t been fresh fruit or vegetables in the pen. There hadn’t been honey. There hadn’t been anything truly warm or heavy or solid or real. He’d eaten a little, but mostly he’d dropped weight- came out of that place about thirty pounds lighter than he had been when he’d gone in. He was still too light, really. His stomach had shrunk, and he didn’t feel like eating as often as he really should, especially now that he was walking and working so much.

The woman came out of the kitchen with a knife in her hand and gestured to Castiel. “If you hurt him, I’m not going to be the one to kill you in your sleep because there are people in this town- good people- who will do it for me,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?” Castiel asked, choking on his water.

“Dean Winchester is a good man who’s been through more than you or your crazy-ass clothesless brother could reckon,” she said, “and I know what that look means.”

Castiel shook his head. “You don’t have to worry,” he replied. “I’m not his type.”

She raised an eyebrow and chuckled. “You might be surprised,” she said.

Castiel cocked his head to the left, and expression of surprise, of puzzlement. “Really?” He said.

The woman nodded. “Of course, we all knew Michael was trouble.” She walked back into the kitchen.

Castiel smiled at his plate. Threw down a ten. Walked to the truck with hope in his heart.


End file.
